DELAWARE, OHIO -- "Afghanistan: A Multiethnic Country With a Tortured
Past and Uncertain Future" is the title of this year's Butler A.
Jones Lecture Series on Race and Society at Ohio Wesleyan University.
Dr. Alam M. Payind, Professor at Kabul University in Afghanistan, will
present the lecture on Monday, April 22 in the R.W. Corns Building, room
312, at 7:30 p.m. The lecture is sponsored by Minority Student Affairs,
Office of the Provost and the department of sociology and anthropology.

Payind was raised in Afghanistan and Pakistan and received all three of
his graduate degrees in the United States. He worked as a tenured government
employee in Afghanistan, and in 1986, after seven years of Soviet occupation
of Afghanistan, he decided to seek permanent positions at American universities.

Payind specializes in comparative foreign policy, Middle Eastern and South
Asian politics, international education and cultural exchange. He has
served as an adjunct professor at Ohio State University since 1985 and
as the Director of the OSU Middle
East Studies Center since 1987. Payind has earned several scholarships
and honors at OSU, including the Outstanding Teaching Award by the Committee
of Arts and Sciences Student Council and the International Outstanding
Staff Award for contributions to international study and research.

Payind is currently in the process of publishing a book called Major
Powers and Muslim Countries: The Dilemma of Understanding Indigenous Dynamics.
He has written numerous publications, such as "Afghanistan's Relations
with Iran, Pakistan and Central Asian Countries," a chapter in the
upcoming book Iran and The Emerging Global Order and "Evolving
Alternative Views on the Future of Afghanistan: An Afghan Perspective,"
which appears in Asian Survey, 1993. Payind's many papers published
and which have been presented to several universities around the country,
including "Ideological Foundation of Jihad in Islam and the Current
Resistance in Afghanistan" and "Soviet Foreign Policy and the
Invasion of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan: Ideology and Opportunism,"
among many others.

For more information, contact OWU's Department of Sociology and Anthropology
at 740-368-3835.